Closing tabs

Traveling tomorrow (not super-early but early for me), just finishing up getting things ready to go. A few tabs to close:

A shortage of tutu-makers. (Via GeekPress.)

Caleb's 2015 in notes. (I was startled recently by the discovery of the word zarf as applied to the cardboard ring that fills a comparable function!)

Ellis Avery on life at waist level.

The FT's interview with Elena Ferrante (site registration required):

A page is well written when the labour and pleasure of truthful narration supplant any other concern, including a concern with formal elegance. I belong to the category of writers who throw out the final draft and keep the rough when this practice ensures a higher degree of authenticity.

I have designs on this lounge for tomorrow morning....

Closing tabs

Ugh, I'm still ailing - I feel terrible! Canceled my class this morning and slept much of the day but still have to pull myself together to finish writing my overdue review and get student papers read for tomorrow and Wednesday. Have already taken Advil to no avail - perhaps more caffeine might be helpful? Really lying down seems like the only thing I am inclined to do....

Read my friend and colleague Rachel Adams' new book Raising Henry on the train back from New Haven yesterday. It is superb - highly recommended.

Closing tabs:

Ghostwriting for Tom Clancy. (Curious omission: he never even hints at what he was paid. If I were a ghostwriter, I'd prefer it to be for celebrity autobiographies, but I've always been curious about whether it really would be possible to make a living that way - I mean, it would be less suited to my skill set than my actual job, but I like thinking about it!)

The Hollywood mountain lion known as P-22.

Ruth Franklin's devastating account of Norman Rush's new novel.

This is what I will need for the coming zombie apocalypse. (One cat on each float?)

Custom-built bicycle for a man with no arms.

At Public Books, Katie Gemmill considers eighteenth-century Pygmalion Thomas Day and the victims of his project.

Closing tabs

Not sure if this link is gated or not (I think not, but it's hard to tell with on-campus ethernet!), but my colleague Rachel Adams' book Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery has received a wonderful review from Jerome Groopman in the New York Review of Books.

I hate to make this juxtaposition, but I am still reeling from finding out late last night that a close college friend died earlier this week. Probably by her own hand but the details are still shrouded in obscurity. Checking Facebook, email and phone obsessively to see if I can find out more, even though really there is nothing to know except that it is an awful loss. Here is a picture: she was a great beauty, as well as one of the strongest and most focused and accomplished people I know. One of the last times I saw her properly was for drinks after our mutual friend Carey's memorial service last year. Very strange and sad to think that they are both gone.

Linkage

Not literary in any particular sense, but do read this piece by Michael Ogg on what it means to depend on home health care aides when sidelined by a permanent disability (via Jane Gross).

A. L. Kennedy on why the worst part of writing is waiting.

Phil Nugent on the trials and tribulations of Winter Wipeout!

Finally, I got a nice piece of news the other day from my friend Helen Hill's mother Becky. Helen's last film, "The Florestine Dresses," has been completed by her husband Paul, and will premiere at the Indie Grits Film Festival at the Nickleodeon Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina on April 13-17, 2011. I will definitely be there for the premiere, and will do what I can to help gather a large group of Helen's friends for the occasion.

(There was an exhibit of the dresses themselves a few years ago; alas, I missed it, though I remember seeing the dresses not long after Helen had first found them - there were more than a hundred of them! - in trash bags on the street and rescued them and begun to investigate the story of their creation.)